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The Many Voices of Wikipedia, Heard in One Place

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 6 — As hard-core Wikipedia contributors gathered here during the weekend to consider the next phase of the online encyclopedia’s life cycle, Jimmy Wales, the site’s founder, said that the emphasis going forward would be on quality, not quantity.

With 1.2 million entries in Wikipedia, “there’s a sense in the English community that we’re going from the era of growth to the era of quality,” Mr. Wales said in an interview. “That could mean quality control — making sure the information is accurate — and it could mean a clearer presentation, or more information.”

Wikipedia has become known as the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but in practical terms, it is mostly a cadre of devotees who contribute to the site and obsess over it.

About 400 of them paid to attend the second annual Wikimania conference, an event that showed far more professional trappings than the first. It was held at Harvard Law School rather than a German youth hostel, the organizer was paid for her work and the corporate sponsors included Amazon.com, Nokia and Coca-Cola.

Although there have been some well-publicized errors — some intentional, some not — published on Wikipedia, the site has also earned some good marks for accuracy. A survey in the science journal Nature found four errors in Wikipedia for every three in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Then again, as several contributors at Wikimania acknowledged, the site could be judged more harshly on other criteria. Entries can ramble, and there are times when the idiosyncratic enthusiasms of contributors rule the day. (The “wiki” name is derived from a Hawaiian term meaning quick or fast, according to the site.)

“One of the running jokes is that there are better articles on Pokémon than on certain kinds of science,” said Alex Schenck, 19, a volunteer site administrator who delivered a presentation on the factors behind Wikipedia’s success. “That could be true.”

Mr. Wales said that the frequency of changes could decrease, suggesting that, as time passed, the Wikipedia product would become more important than the collaborative process supporting it.

For instance, he said, the German-language Wikipedia will soon begin creating some “stable entries,” good enough to publish in a textbook or other traditional media. Most likely, he said, these entries will exist in two versions, one of which can still be changed by the public.

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If that experiment goes well, Mr. Wales said, the English-language version of Wikipedia could follow suit in the next year.

“Stability is important not in itself, but in the sense of feeling more comfortable that we’re presenting our best work,” he said.

Mr. Wales said he expected less of a free-for-all atmosphere as the site grew up. “There was a time when you could come to Wikipedia and there was a red link to Africa, and you could write that Africa was a continent,” he said. “Now the links that are left are less and less famous, less and less big.”

Angela Beesley, a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit entity that supervises the site, said in an interview that she was less concerned with the sprawling nature of some Wikipedia entries than with “accuracy, then balance.”

As for the sometimes choppy writing, “it’s difficult to organize whole articles, so people don’t edit them as a whole,” she said. “That’s something we need to encourage.”

At times the conference itself seemed to be dealing with the same issues. One member of the foundation’s board, Florence Nibart-Devouard, stormed out of a news conference because she had not been told about the announcement being made. And on Thursday afternoon, signs concerning registration had the opening time crossed out, replaced by the word “later.”

“It’s a funny thing,” Mr. Wales said. “I had no idea that anyone was putting up signs. Someone somewhere said there should be signs, and someone did it. It’s effective.”

“But,” he added, “it’s chaotic.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Many Voices of Wikipedia, Heard in One Place. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe